Todd Gitlin Reviews Obama's Speech

March 18, 2008

We reached out to
several friends of the magazine to respond to Obama's big
speech in Philadelphia today. Here's what Todd Gitlin,
professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, had to
say.

This speech was a triumph on so many levels, does one
dare hope it will turn
the trick for hordes of parsing skeptics and listeners whose eyes did not
water?

First, Obama took the high road, which is also the long
and demanding road. He refused to "move on" with a cursory acknowledgment that
"mistakes were made." He did not acknowledge. He preached and he reasoned. The
law professor was in the pulpit. He refused to settle for sprinkling what have
become the automatic contemporary word-drops of "distancing." It will still be
possible to parse his words for insufficiencies of denunciation, but Obama's
gamble was that he could turn Wright's damnable sins into a pivot for a sermon
about how the past can be overcome, about how American it would be to accomplish that
hard and necessary objective. "We may have different
stories but we hold common hopes"--that was the theme. I don't know if this is
true, but we will find
out whether it is what America needs to
believe.

"I can no more
disown him than I can disown the black community," he said of the Reverend Wright. "I can no more
disown him than I can my white grandmother--a woman who helped raise me, a woman who
sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves
anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who
passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered
racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of
me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love."
Now, the Reverend
Wright's damnations were not simple expressions of racial fear. Or were they?
With his little history lesson, extrapolated from black experience to everyone
else's paranoia--all
that white anger "grounded in legitimate concerns"--Obama was saying that those statements of
Wright he rejected and denounced stemmed
from a long ugly history of racial fear; and that the only people to
overcome "the racial stalemate" with are the people one belongs to. Politics is
crucial, politics is the only way America will improve, but the place
of politics is among imperfect persons. He did not flatter America
by saying the only angels of its nature are the better
ones.

An interesting subtext: filial pride. Family values, you
might say. Wright, a parental force, stands for him as a man who came from
somewhere, an imperfect American. America, in other words, is imperfect
and drives toward a higher form
of imperfection. Wright's error was in speaking as if society was
static! So Obama challenged his listeners: Are you, with Wright, stuck in the
past, or are you ready to roll? What Obama was saying is that America is a
perennially self-starting community paradoxically mired in the past, but its
opportunity is to overcome that past, and its test is to strive to do that--not by demonization but on
a couple of wings and a lot of prayers.

And finally, the temperature of this speech is one of
its messages; or should I say invitations? Obama kept his cool and turned up the
heat at the same time. For those who have not yet voted, and crucially to the
superdelegates, he raised the stakes, asking them all: Can you, too, keep your
cool and your heat at the same time? The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, he said, had spoken in
an "incendiary" manner, but Obama offered himself as the man who rises from
flames and invites you to rise from your own. He took a grievous embarrassment
and moved his lesson to the plane of prophecy. Talk about hope; talk about audacity. Tears
came to my eyes. I don't think I'm especially hard-hearted, but I cannot think of another time when the
speech of a presidential candidate watered me up.

At his own moment of crisis, in 1952, Richard Nixon
finicked his way into history accompanied by a non-returnable cocker spaniel named Checkers. In
2008, Obama chose his own game: a new hybrid of chess. It might be a
game-changer. We'll find out.